200 just evolved as the sweetspot for all civs balance-wise, nothing to do with being an artifical low number.
Pretty much how the game was originally balanced around 75 pop games with the Goth +10pop bonus being a remaint of that time.
I think itās high time to make 400 be the new 200. If once upon a time 75 was the sweet spot, then jumping from 200 to 400 should be fine.
I said artificially low because most PCs in 2025 can handle much more than 200 and itās weird to bump your head on 200 most every game. After playing it for years as many of us have, we can handle the added complexity or fun of managing 200 more pop
As I said before, AoE isnāt and shouldnāt be a birth control management simulator 
.. as if the leader of our empire is like:
- āEveryoneā¦ citizens of this great and mighty empire! Here me out. We have, sadly, reached our 200 population cap. This number is what the game world you are living in was balanced around. So, from this day forward, I decree that no new births shall occur in my empire until other units die or our gameplayer overlord sitting behind the screen with mouse and keyboard in hand presses the ādeleteā key on some of us. You and that player shall watch the population ticker in the upper-left of your screen like a hawk and once it falls below 200, then, and only then, are you allowed to have another grown baby or create another unit. I deem this to be a good and fun mechanic for our empire, for both you as citizens, and also that mysterious player controlling us behind the screen sitting in their computer chair. We shall conquer all! But only with 200.ā
Since 400 or 500 is a much higher ceiling and much more rarely hit/experienced, thatās why I hope the game is someday balanced at it.
Itās also why I think AoE IVās 200 pop count with some units taking multiple slots is sad. Released relatively recently, yet you canāt play one game without hitting the cap non-stop ā unless you install a mod to raise the limit
Have you ever played a 4-player game on a 2-player map? It gets crowded really fast. In a 1v1, nobody would ever reach the pop cap because there just isnāt enough space for an economy to support it, nor enough space to lay all the population buildings youād need, for starters.
Thereās dozens of reasons why pushing the cap to 400 would be a bad idea, and every potential solution to any one of those problems would be even worse than just suffering all the problems that 400 pop brings us to begin with, so itās a hard no. Zero debate.
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Basically this. Also, the jump from 75 to 200 isnāt as severe as 200 to 400.
Also, RTS like AoE 2 are heavy on the CPU despite being a 1999 game at heart, so the game would start lagging. The same can be btw said about AoE 4.
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Have you ever tried fast castle Ratha BTW?
Also the āstandardā of 75 wasnāt āstandard,ā it was default, and used by the Campaigns.
Players generally played on 200 pop in multiplayer for basically all of time because it was an option and players migrated to it. People havenāt at-large migrated to 400 pop for good reason.
Why would you do that? You pick bigger maps when there are more players. I maybe did that a long time ago, but, fortunately, the game allows us to pick bigger maps.
Actually, you remind me of how I did enjoy at one point putting 8 players (no teams) in a free-for-all, me vs. 7 AI, on a tiny map. Iāll have to do that again! Thanks for the reminder!
True, and theyāre probably mostly eSports/Ranked reasons, which I donāt play. Ranked MP trumps all other modes
How about a medium no, with 1% debate?
I seem to do okay 2 human vs. 2 AI on decent-sized maps w/ 400 pop cap. Is how I always play MP. Sometimes 2 v 3 AI
And yet Iāve played a number of matches in AoEIV with 400 pop cap, 2 human vs 2 AI, no problem whatsoever with lag
Itās okay, I guess Iāll wait until 2035 or beyond to see if AoE5 can take better advantage of hardware. And see if players are up to the task of managing such a large empire
I use 300 personally. My computer is fairly low-end, so it couldnāt handle a 400 pop limit standard, but 300 is a good sweetspot for larger battles.
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A couple of years ago, they gained the +20g per reseached tech, which is quite nice, but not strong enough for pros.
I tried Arabia size of 3 and 200 max pop, and won without trouble (against Huns and Lithuanuabs). At the end, I only reached 185/200 pop, so the result would have been the same with higher pop cap.
Yesterday I played twice on the previous patch. I did not notice any increase in aggressivity. Actually yesterday I got āattackedā by Frank scouts, who were not actively raiding/focus firing and died to my few spears and villagers.
When they started coordinating their armies, one of them was always dead.
I am never confident aboit my late game and always end up fighting in Feudal or castle age. This I can boom behind it, this us deadly against moderate DE AI, which should be capped at 40 villagers (in todays game, both finished with a villager high of 37), so I can outboom both of them and throw my bigger army before they are fully developed.
Do not put too much thoughts about Soanish in tournaments: if you want to let the opponent boom and have a post imperial age warfare, then Spanish are great and have a great tech tree. They struggle in Arabia tournaments because the small advantage of a couple of hundreds of resources difference snowball tremendously; if you waste this little advantage by only developing yourself, Spanish catches up and outscales most civs.
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Sweet, nicely done! I will try the same soon and see how it goes for me. Do you do early raids? Thatās the only way Iāve found decent success with the AI on steroids. Based on what you say later, I assume so. I prefer to not be forced to do early raids, but the devs seemingly donāt want boring silence. Want action and chaos. I should stop delaying or turtling and play the one way devs programmed the game to be played
Also, I wonder if the AI are aware of what the max pop setting is before they start doing anything and configure their gameplay accordingly. Only ask since I never do 200 pop cap. Always 400
Because you early raided one of them into oblivion? I didnt understand this part
With such a relatively small econ, they sure crank military out like they have bottomless bank accounts. They must not upgrade their techs very much. I upgrade a lot, I should stop. I also create fast more villagers than 40. I should stop. I always wondered why their score is like 8000 and mine l mine is 15K+ and yet they are wiping me out. This is probably why.
Then again, the AI get to trade, I donāt.
I agree with what has been said above, but I would like to add one thing: build orders are like musical scales for an instrument. After you have done them hundreds of times, you also learn to mess around with them.
They are not something you have to follow rigidly; there is always room for improvisation or some optimisation.
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I decided that Iāll not play online for a while because there are new glitches in the game. I noticed today that I had queued the pikeman upgrade but it wasnāt progressing, nor could I cancel it. Just now, I tried to train 5 archers on the 3rd barbarossa mission, but instead, the game queues 5 hand cannoneers. Also, I cannot un-queue them. Last week I noticed that I could not un-queue the fletching upgrade - that has been happening for a while, intermittently. I mean even months ago I encountered this glitch. Really annoying. I guess Iāll write a bug report soon.
Edit: my mistake, it shows hand cannoneers being trained within the radial menu of the archery range, but on the global queue list it is training archers. Seems to be working just showing the wrong thing.
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Since the last update, I often have villagers stuck while collecting ressources. I think itās a new unattended behavior.
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I tried Arabia, 200 pop, capped my villager pop to around 40 for a long time, and finally won. I barely survived their first typical, predictable, algorithmic, coordinated wave(s) of attack, so it wasnāt a pretty win. But playing it how the devs want me to play works. You must constantly think about offense because that is the funner state of mind, per the gameās design. Had I constrained myself to that earlier and done early attacks/raids, which is also probably in the gameās gold-encrusted āhow to playā guide book, I probably would have won more easily
Turtling or a defensive posture on this map would be next-to-impossible, as it is with other maps that even have environmental barriers you can leverage. Or focusing on econ rather than military one minute too long will be your undoing. The battering rams and coordinated waves of knights and/or infantry will decimate you and your castles/towers
Gone are the days where you can play how you want to play.
I should write my own instruction manual called, āAoE2DE: Offense Is the Only Way To Go.ā
ā¦ with the tagline: āThe best offense and defense is a good offense 
ā
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